Chicago Sun Times: Grant Park Music Festival's new principal conductor bringing a contextualized 'bucket list' to the repertoire
“Chicago was really the place that really pushed me not only as a conductor but as a musician overall and showed me what the possibilities could be,” Giancarlo Guerrero says.
By Kyle MacMillan - For the Sun-Times, Jun 6, 2025 (photo credit Victor Hilitski)
For Giancarlo Guerrero, beginning a major new post in Chicago as artistic director and principal conductor of the Grant Park Music Festival is like coming home.
Chicago was where the Grammy Award-winning Costa Rican conductor solidified his foothold in the United States and received his essential training as a conductor at the feet of Victor Yampolsky, Northwestern University’s now-retired director of orchestras.
“Altogether, Chicago was really the place that really pushed me not only as a conductor but as a musician overall and showed me what the possibilities could be,” he said.
The Grant Park Music Festival announced Guerrero’s appointment in October, and he will lead his first concert on June 18 — a program that culminates with the “Symphonic Suite” from Leonard Bernstein’s score for the acclaimed 1954 film “On the Waterfront.”
This year’s installment of the 10-week summer classical-music series, which features the Grant Park Orchestra and Chorus and guest soloists from around the world, opens Wednesday and runs through Aug. 16.
The festival dates to 1935, when symphonic offerings in Grant Park became an annual tradition. It chose to keep its well-recognized name when it moved its offerings in 2004 to then-newly opened Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park.
Guerrero, 56, ended his 16-year tenure in May as music director of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, where he put an emphasis on contemporary American music and oversaw more than 20 recordings that earned him six Grammy Awards.
Guerrero replaces another conductor with Latin American ties, Carlos Kalmar, who was born in Uruguay to Austrian Jewish parents. Kalmar stepped down at the end of Grant Park’s 2024 season after 25 seasons, assuming the title of conductor laureate.
The festival signed Guerrero to a three-year contract with four weeks of concerts each summer.
Paul Winberg, the festival’s president and chief executive officer, had said the organization was looking for a conductor who could achieve a “magical alchemy” with the forces onstage and audiences.
Guerrero, who first appeared at the festival in 2008, returned last July for two back-to-back programs that served as his tryout. He said immediately felt a rapport with the festival musicians.
“You get in front of an orchestra, and you give your downbeat at the first rehearsal, and, all of sudden, the magic starts happening,” he said. “There is something about the connection that you feel with the players, and you start making music.”
Guerrero praised the festival’s free-admission policy and its adventurous programming. Kalmar offset familiar classics with intriguing combinations of new and unusual works from the past — a defining hallmark of his tenure — and Guerrero plans to do much the same.
“I’m bringing my own repertoire,” he said, noting that every conductor has favorite pieces and a “bucket list” of ones they still want to do. The key is context. “Just programming for the sake that ‘I like it,’ that’s not enough. It has to have a message, whether its a programmatic or stylistic message or something that holds a program together.”
He said he’s also aiming to continue to the festival’s longtime emphasis on American repertoire but wants to draw on his experience as former music director of the Wrocław Philharmonic in Poland and former principal guest conductor of the Gulbenkian Orchestra in Lisbon to present more modern and contemporary European works, especially from Poland, Germany and France.
Like his predecessors, Guerrero said he hopes to spotlight works that showcase the festival’s professional chorus, which he said chorus director Christopher Bell has built into “something quite special.”
He is particularly looking forward to the summer’s culminating concerts Aug. 15 and 16, featuring the chorus in Carl Orff’s thundering masterwork “Carmina Burana.” “It is a such a riot to conduct, to hear and to play.”
Other works he is excited about this summer include Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, “Titan,” on June 20 and 21 in a rare version that will include a section titled “Blumine” that was included in early performances and later removed, and Jennifer Higdon’s “The Singing Rooms” on Aug. 8 and 9.
Guerrero is at a major transitional point in his life and career. Now that his children are out of the house, he and his wife are moving to a condo in Miami they bought when he served from 2011 to 2016 as principal guest conductor for the Cleveland Orchestra’s annual residency there.
Born in Nicaragua, Guerrero fled with his family when he was 11 to Costa Rica following the civil war and played in the Costa Rica Youth Symphony and Costa Rican National Symphony Orchestra.
He moved to the United States to study percussion at Baylor University in Texas, where he took a mandatory conducting class when he was junior and where, much to his surprise, a professor told him that he appeared to have a natural talent for it.
Along with his continuing percussion studies, he was accepted into the conducting program at Northwestern University, where he got his master’s degree in 1992. “Coming from Waco to Chicago was a shock,” he said.
He was enthralled with being able to regularly hear the Chicago Symphony Orchestra — which he has since guest conducted three times — from fall to spring and attend the Grant Park Festival during summers. “All of sudden, the world of music opened up before my eyes,” he said.
He called Yampolsky, who played violin in the Moscow Philharmonic and Boston Symphony and held five music directorships, “one of the greatest musicians” he has ever known. He said the teacher helped Guerrero shed bad habits and learn what it takes mentally and physically to be a conductor.
More than 30 years since earning his Northwestern degree, Guerrero is returning to Chicago to begin a new chapter. Kalmar offered this dvice about the Grant Park job to whomever succeeded him: “Take it, run with it, and put your own stamp on it.”
That is exactly what Guerrero intends to do.
Original Article HERE
Article also published on WBEZ Chicago HERE